HEADS UP - DEVFS ON MASTER

From:

Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date:

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 22:16:25 -0700 (PDT)

Alex's GSOC project, DEVFS is now on master and active. Some care must
be taken when upgrading.
* A full buildworld, buildkernel, installkernel, installworld sequence
is needed. No changes to fstab are needed, /dev will be mounted
from devfs automatically by the kernel.
* If you run a new kernel with an old world (without devfs) you will
not be able to login as root, but you will still be able to login
as a user and su, and you should still be able to boot single-user.
In otherwords, things will be messed up but in a fixable way, until
both the world and the kernel are in sync.
* A great deal of testing of basic functions has been done, but
there is still a very good chance of breakage. Please test and
report any issues. Very few GUI components have been tested,
so if X or sound stops working it may be a day or two before we
can get it whacked back into shape.
* The master branch may be unstable for a week as wider testing is
done.
* PEOPLE RUNNING CHROOTS: Character and block devices in the filesystem
NO LONGER WORK. If you have chrooted or jailed areas with their own
/dev, you have to use mount_devfs in those areas.
Many features are now working. We have auto-cloning support for
numerous devices but only a few userland utilities have been adjusted
to use it. To reduce issues DEVFS will pre-create a bunch of units for
numerous devices so the non-cloning userland utilities still work.
In addition, fully automatic slice and partition probing and reprobing
is now operational. When you fdisk a drive the slices will pop up
in /dev, and when you disklabel a slice the partitinos will pop up
as well. MBR and disklabel edits will properly and automatically
reprobe the drive. IMHO this is a very, very cool feature.
The nrelease build still has a few issues. It will work and the intaller
will come up, but the installer may have trouble seeing newly created
partitions (a 'retry' usually solves the problem). This is a known
issue and will be fixed.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@backplane.com>